Locatedness and overt sublocales

Locatedness is one of the fundamental notions in constructive mathematics. The existence of a positivity predicate on a locale, i.e. the locale being overt, or open, has proved to be fundamental in constructive locale theory. We show that the two notions are intimately connected. Bishop defines a metric space to be compact if it is complete and totally bounded. A subset of a totally bounded set is again totally bounded iff it is located. So a closed subset of a Bishop compact set is Bishop compact iff it is located. We translate this result to formal topology. ‘Bishop compact’ is translated as compact and overt. We propose a definition of located predicate on subspaces in formal topology. We call a sublocale located if it can be presented by a formal topology with a located predicate. We prove that a closed sublocale of a compact regular locale has a located predicate iff it is overt. Moreover, a Bishop-closed subset of a complete metric space is Bishop compact — that is, totally bounded and complete — iff its localic completion is compact overt. Finally, we show by elementary methods that the points of the Vietoris locale of a compact regular locale are precisely its compact overt sublocales. We work constructively, predicatively and avoid the use of the axiom of countable choice. Consequently, all our results are valid in any predicative topos.